


The Galaxy is an Imperfect Place

by merriman



Category: The Breakfast Club (1985)
Genre: AU: IN SPACE, Don't copy to another site, Hanging Out, M/M, Tame Smooches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 12:28:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21849676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merriman/pseuds/merriman
Summary: Some junior officers and crewmembers just can't seem to stop getting intro trouble. Good thing they're all friends.
Relationships: John Bender/Brian Johnson
Comments: 14
Kudos: 81
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	The Galaxy is an Imperfect Place

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bastet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bastet/gifts).



> I do like a good IN SPACE AU. I tried really hard not to just fall back on Star Trek for terminology but some might have sneaked in when I wasn't looking.

When Ensign Johnson managed to somehow blow up his third spectrum analysis scanner in two days, after being warned, there wasn't a doubt that he was in for a shift down in maintenance.

Ensign Clark really needed to stop playing pranks on his fellow security officers. He'd been told before. It was a distraction and they needed to keep their attention on the safety of the ship and crew. No cutting loose, no matter how funny it was to reverse the gravity in the locker room.

Ensign Standish really should have shown up for that shift on the bridge, but she'd lost track of time. It wasn't that big a deal, was it?

Ensign Bender hadn't done anything that week, actually. But he still had hours to finish from the week before. Somehow he always had maintenance hours to finish.

Crewman Reynolds showed up in the maintenance department every week and manually added her name to the duty roster. For whatever reason, it was never there to start with, but she always was.

~~~~~

"You'll be scrubbing the plasma conduits on subdeck beta," Lieutenant Vernon told them. The week before, he'd had them write up apology letters to their superior officers, but then he'd never sent them. At least this week it looked like he was going to give them real work, not make them sit around in the maintenance office writing or staring at the walls.

"Are we allowed protective gear?" Bender asked. From anyone else it would have seemed like an innocent, even necessary, question. From Ensign Bender it somehow sounded like he was asking if they were allowed to skip out and go to movie night in the mess hall instead.

"You don't need protective gear," Vernon snapped. "You're scrubbing conduits, not going for a spacewalk. The plasma's being rerouted. Now get down there and get to work. I'll be making my rounds frequently!"

On the way down to subdeck beta, Ensign Standish inspected her hands. "Scrubbing conduits is always hell on my cuticles. Come on, let's get some gloves at least."

"Didn't you hear Lieutenant Hardass? We're supposed to go straight to the conduits," Clark commented. But he didn't protest when Standish stopped the pod on subdeck theta and led the way to a storage locker she then unlocked with her bridge ID. 

"Don't they track that?" Johnson asked. "I'm pretty sure they track that." In fact, he was certain that every use of bridge ID credentials was logged and audited. But he was also certain that no one was going to give them any trouble about Standish using hers to get gloves that Lieutenant Vernon probably should have given them in the first place. After all, no one had ever called them on it before. At least, not that he'd been able to track down or that Standish had mentioned.

Gloves acquired, locker re-locked, they headed back to the waiting pod and continued on their way down to subdeck beta.

"So what'd you do this time?" Standish asked Clark.

"Turned the gravity off in the locker room," Clark said. "Honestly, we all needed the laugh. We've been on alert for three weeks now since we entered the nebula. I think Commander Howard's going to burst something if he doesn't blow off some steam soon, one way or another. He gave me two whole shifts! What about you?"

"Spent too long on a transmission home and missed the first hour of my shift on the bridge," Standish said, shrugging. "Like it matters, really. I'm an ensign. No one's looking to me for command decisions."

"They could take you off bridge duty," Reynolds pointed out. "Then you'd have to figure out how to get back on it. Or pick another career path. If you're not going for command, what would you do? Any of you?"

"Security," Bender said, smirking at Clark, who rolled his eyes. "Aw, come on! I'd be a great security officer."

"No one wants to hand you a blaster," Standish noted. "They're not taking me out of command. They might stick me into logistics, but they're not taking me out of command." She said this with such confidence that no one prodded her about it. Besides, Johnson figured she was right. And really, if they hadn't booted her from the bridge after the stunt she'd pulled on that away mission, shopping at some alien marketplace instead of going to meet with the officials she'd been sent to talk to, then they probably meant to keep her around for some reason.

It wasn't a long ride down to subdeck beta. As they got off the pod the lights flickered a little and the whole group heaved a collective sigh. One week they'd been assigned to change out the light panels in the aft cargo holds, so they all knew well what flickering meant.

"Think we should change 'em?" Clark asked, looking up at the panel just outside the pod bay. "I mean, if we don't I'll probably get sent to do it next week. Like I said, I got two whole shifts for that gravity thing."

"I'll do it," Johnson said quickly. Bender said the same thing at the same time, though he sounded more annoyed and less eager and Johnson immediately made a note to try and be less obvious next time something like this came up.

The other three all looked at Johnson and Bender, then Clark shrugged. "Whatever. Long as I don't end up having to do it next week."

The replacement panels were in another storage locker, but this one Bender could unlock without even needing his Engineering ID. All it took was a little twist to the latch and a jiggle to the handle and the locker popped open. The first time Johnson had seen Bender do it, it had seemed like magic. But Bender had shown him a couple of weeks back, it was just a flaw in how these latches were made. They were all built the same way and if you twisted and jiggled just right, they released without unlocking. It was a neat trick.

"Good thing you're here," Johnson said. "I can't get the hang of that. I've tried! But it just won't work for me."

Bender counted out twelve panels and then slammed the locker shut again. "You've just got to show it who's boss," he muttered. "Come on."

The hatch that led into the ceiling ducts was a tight fit for Bender but Johnson shimmied right through behind him without much trouble. That was one thing he'd discovered after the first time he'd broken equipment and ended up on maintenance detail: He could fit into just about any of the weird ducts and crawlspaces the ship had. It didn't really come in useful in the ship's labs, but it helped out here quite often.

Johnson slid the panels ahead of himself, just behind Bender. The panels had to be replaced from above, which was bad design as far as Johnson was concerned. Why make lights you couldn't simply reach up and replace? And they were annoyingly short-lived. He'd toyed with the idea of proposing a solution to that to his supervising officer, but then if he succeeded, he wouldn't have as many excuses to crawl up into the ceilings with Bender.

They'd just reached the flickering panels when the lift pod whooshed down and opened. Lieutenant Vernon almost never actually checked on them, but here he was, strolling out into the corridor like he was the damn captain. Johnson peered down from above the mesh ceiling. Vernon looked around, then up as the light panel flickered.

"Hey!" he snapped, striding down the corridor towards the three they'd left behind. "Where's Johnson and Bender!"

"Replacing the lights, sir," Standish said. She smiled politely at him. "I think they had to go up to subdeck sigma to requisition new panels."

"I sent you down here to scrub the conduits! Not change the lights!"

Johnson glanced at Bender, who was silently mimicking Vernon, managing to get every word just right as he mouthed along. 

"We can't really work in the dark," Clark pointed out. "And it's one less job to do later."

"Yeah, you'd be worried about that, wouldn't you. You and Bender," Vernon muttered. "I want those two back on the double! And next time, get my approval before requisitioning anything!"

Johnson could still see him at the far end of the corridor. Standish and Clark had paused their work to talk to Vernon, but Reynolds was busily scrubbing away at the conduit in front of herself, face hidden behind her hair. 

Vernon watched Reynolds' back for a moment, then shook his head. "Get back to work!" he snapped at Standish and Clark before strolling back to the pod and leaving. Once he was gone, Clark grumbled something Johnson couldn't make out and Standish shoved him a little before pulling out a datapack and leaning against the bulkhead to scroll through it.

"You owe us!" Clark called up to the ceiling.

"Yeah yeah, whatever," Bender called down to him as he replaced the flickering panels with new ones, then set the rest aside so he could turn around and face Johnson. "We've gotta stop meeting like this," he drawled before pressing in close for a kiss. Johnson tipped back a little, then had to shift when he hit something pointy in the crawlspace. It was probably one of the nanofilament junctions.

"Hang on," Johnson said, peeling away until he found a bare section of wall space.

"Dork," Bender muttered before kissing him again. Below them, Johnson could hear Clark and Standish arguing over the fastest way to get the cleaning done so they could knock off for the rest of the shift so long as Vernon didn't come snooping around again. Reynolds only interrupted to point out that she'd just finished the first one and maybe the fastest way to get it done was just to do it. It wasn't that hard.

"You know," Clark called up to them about twenty minutes later. "You don't have to go up there to make out, we all know what you're doing!"

"It's probably uncomfortable," Standish noted. 

Bender pulled back and smirked at Johnson, then called back down to them. "I'm showing Johnson how to reroute the ion _thrust injectors_!"

"Aren't those under the floor panels?" Reynolds asked.

"How would you know?" Bender called. "I'm in Engineering! I know what I'm talking about! Lots of thrust!"

Johnson shook his head. "Well. That's the mood gone," he sighed before climbing down out of the shaft. It was impossible to climb out of there without your uniform getting rumpled, but that had been half the point when they'd started these little forrays together. Still, there wasn't much of a reason for his uniform collar to be undone. And it wasn't as if they were particularly quiet.

"Hey!," Bender called down. "You all ever heard the one about the alien, the gas nebula, and three bottles of Aldebarran rum?"

"Yes!" Standish called back, tossing a spanner at the ceiling hatch closest to where Bender's voice was coming from. "Now get down here and help us finish. Reynolds says she knows a good spot to hang out for the rest of the shift."

Cleaning the plasma conduits wasn't really hard work so much as tedious and annoying. Which was, of course, why it got assigned to the punishment details and not to the regular maintenance crews. Still, Reynolds seemed to have a knack for figuring out how to do it faster, and before they knew it, they were done. Bender set the plasma priming sequence going on the conduits and Reynolds led them through a small hatch hidden behind an otherwise unremarkable bulkhead.

As they emerged from the hatch, they found themselves in what looked like a storage unit, except it wasn't storing much aside from some tarps and some ancient-looking tools.

"How did you find this?" Johnson asked her. "Why is it even here?"

"It's from when they built the ship," Bender said, examining the tools. "These look about the right age. When they build ships in spacedock, they make these sealed rooms so the crew can take breaks, even spend the night without having to fly back to the stations. But they're all in weird spots, so when they finish a section, they just wall them off."

Reynolds nodded and opened a cabinet. "I found it last week when I was exploring. There's all sorts of stuff on this ship you officers never see."

Standish was laying out one of the tarps to sit on and Clark was unpacking the lunch he'd brought with him. He always shared it out, even though the rest of them brought their ration bars.

"Do you all ever think maybe it's stupid to keep getting in trouble just to hang out?" Johnson asked as he sat down and took a bag of protein chips from Clark. "We could just… not get in trouble and meet in the mess hall or something."

They all looked around at each other. Sure, it had started with each of them getting punishment detail. They'd just sort of kept going like that ever since.

"I know our shifts have some overlap," Standish was saying, looking at her datapack. "I could maybe get us all moved to the same shifts. It would take some time. Hey, Reynolds, what shift are you on? I don't see you anywhere on the rosters."

Reynolds was drawing something in the dust on the floor and looked up. "Oh, I'm not on there. I'm a stowaway." She looked down again.

No one spoke. Reynolds didn't look back up, so she didn't see them all staring at her as she continued to add detail to whatever it was she was drawing. 

"Why?" Johnson finally asked. Sure, he'd heard about stowaways, but he hadn't thought they had any on board. Which, he realized, was kind of the point. If stowaways announced themselves, they wouldn't be stowaways anymore, they'd be in the brig, then they'd be left on the nearest station.

"I wanted to travel," Reynolds said, still not looking up. "Seemed like the easiest way to do it. Why bother with all that training when I could just hitch a ride? If you pitch in and keep your head down, no one really cares."

"Hey, we care," Clark told her.

"If you switch up your shifts and stop getting put on maintenance, I probably won't see you. It's too risky to go to the upper decks."

Now Johnson could see what she'd been drawing - a detailed sketch of the exterior of the ship.

"I've still got a shift next week," Clark said, this time addressing the whole group. "What about you, Standish?"

Standish shrugged. "I'm sure I can be late for another shift some time this week."

"I'll just insult Vernon before we leave for the day," Bender said.

"I'm really good at breaking things," Johnson added. "I don't even have to try."

"Settled, then," Standish said, tapping something into her datapack. "Next week we'll all be back here, and I'll figure something out in the future. After all, why deal with Vernon if we don't have to?"


End file.
